1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a system and method for dynamic updating of display windows using a pushed stream of data.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a vast area of information sources available today. In many instances that real differentiation to a consumer between each of these sources relates to the “freshness” of the data provided. This is particularly true when the data may change moment to moment.
Existing distributed network tools for analyzing data often employ delayed or historical data. Such tools when monitoring constantly changing data may produce analyses that are less than accurate. For example, systems that display financial data on a periodic refresh schedule, may lead a user to make erroneous decisions pertaining to a financial transaction, resulting in substantial financial losses. The continual display of stale data may over time reduce a user's confidence to an extent that the continuing quest for the data from an information source may be terminated.
The real-time distribution of rapidly changing data via other modes of communication, such as by wireless devices such as cell phones, has been shown to be very useful in a number of contexts. Real-time access to information is a goal of many technological companies. For example, the real-time provision of financial information has been shown to be highly desired by many investors, with numerous entities being consumers of such services of Reuters world wide that provide real-time financial information at client sites in a controlled network.
The so-called Internet is a widely distributed decentralized network. The World Wide Web makes a system of internet servers that support documents in HyperText markup Language (“HTML”) which support links to other documents. Web pages may contain hypertext links that are used to connect to any combination of graphics, audio, video and text, in a non-linear or non-sequential manner HyperText Transfer Protocol (“HTTP”) references the underlying protocol employed by the World Wide Web, a protocol that defines how messages are formatted and transmitted and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. HTTP is a stateless protocol wherein each command is executed independently without any knowledge of the commands that came before. An HTTP client initiates a request by establishing a Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection to a particular port on a remote host (port 80 by default). An HTTP server listening on that port waits for the client to send a Request Message. The HTTP specification, such as HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2068), designates the rules for transfer. Web pages are obtained at Web servers by use of the Uniform Resource Locator, the global address of resources on the World Wide Web.
HTTP specification 1.1, dated January 1997, referred to as HTTP/1.1 (RFC 2068), the specification of which is hereby incorporated by reference, permits a chunking option. The chunking option refers to a transfer coding implementation that allows a body of a message to be transferred as a series of chunks, so-called “chunked data.” Each chunked data is sent with its own size indicator, followed by an optional footer containing entity-header fields. Chunking envisions sending along with the entire message the size of the message.
As the World Wide Web has become the source of information for many consumers, including those seeking financial information, it would be advantageous if persons could access real-time, dynamic data, such as financial data, over a widely distributed network as the Internet, in particular using the World Wide Web.
Dynamic content has been allowed to be created in Web pages using the Common Gateway Interface (CGI). CGI calls or procedures enable applications to generate dynamically created HTML output, thus creating Web pages with dynamic content. However, retrieval of data is linked to when the Web page is invoked.
Some have suggested taking advantage of the HTTP protocol to cause a true stream of dynamic data. U.S. Pat. No. 6,754,621 to Cunningham et al. discloses prolonged streaming of data is achievable by specifying a reasonably large value as the content-length of the HTTP response packet. Data streaming may be continued when the transmitted data reaches the specified length when a new request/response exchange is initiated such that streaming of the financial data carries on from the point it left off. U.S. Pat. No. 6,412,009 to Erickson et al. utilizes a chunking option specified in the HTTP specification 1.1, dated January 1997 to send a series of HTTP messages with embedded session-oriented data between the Web server and the Web client without sending an end chunk message to cause the connection to remain active to series of interleaved HTTP messages between the Web server and the Web client, thereby creating an HTTP tunnel that is persistent for the duration of the communication between the host system and the Web client. (forming a persistent virtual connection between two endpoints of the connection-oriented protocol). U.S. Patent Publication No. 20020161853 To Burak et al. also discloses a real-time financial charting system of stock market pricing information over a browser-only interface by obtaining data pushed from a server over the World Wide Web making use of HTTP tunneling.